Woman Treats Medical Patient Through Google After Being Mistaken for a Doctor

If there’s one thing you shouldn’t do when you’re sick, it’s Googling your symptoms. Type in “fever” and “headache” into WebMD, and you get every diagnosis under the sun from a simple flu to full-blown cancer. Not helpful and not reassuring. But for one woman, Googling symptoms actually helped someone out.

A woman named Hannah recently received a text from a guy named Matt, who works at a vascular lab. The text was meant for a doctor, which Hannah is not, but was sent to the wrong number. Matt described a patient’s symptoms with the intention of getting advice from a medical professional:

Hey Dr. Park, this is Matt from the vascular lab, I have an outpatient here with an external iliac occlusion with cold foot pain and numbness that started three days ago. What should I do with her?

Those are definitely more specific symptoms than “runny nose.” Rather than correcting Matt about the wrong number and leaving it at that, Hannah did a quick Google search and responded with a helpful suggestion:

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And wouldn’t you know, she was actually right!

The lab technician texted her a few hours later, letting her know that the trained doctors came to the same conclusion. Naturally, Hannah decided to ask about any openings in the field:

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Even if Hannah doesn’t have a future in medicine, she definitely seizes an opportunity when she sees one!

Though we wouldn’t recommend you actually treating your medical symptoms via Google, it’s reassuring to know that the Internet isn’t totally full of false information. Still, it’s probably better to see your doctor when you can!